July 25th is National Hot Fudge Sundae Day

Posted on July 25, 2017

Five Food Finds about Fudge:

Fudge is a type of Western confectionery which is usually very sweet, and extremely rich. It is made by mixing sugar, butter, and milk and heating it to the soft-ball stage at 240 °F (116 °C), and then beating the mixture while it cools so that it acquires a smooth, creamy consistency.

The components of fudge are very similar to the traditional recipe for tablet, which is noted in The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie (1692-1733).

The term “fudge” is often used in the United Kingdom for a softer variant of the tablet recipe.

American-style fudge (containing chocolate) is found in a letter written by Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, a student at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Word of this popular confectionery spread to other women’s colleges. For example, Wellesley and Smith have their own versions of a fudge recipe dating from the late 19th or early 20th century.

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

1871 Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York was issued a patent for perforated wrapping paper.

1872 It was reported to have rained black worms in Bucharest, Rumania.

1874 Sergey Vasilyevich Lebedev was born. Lebedev was a Russian chemist who developed a method to produce synthetic rubber on a commercial scale, which used potatoes and limestone as raw materials.

1948 Bread rationing ends in Britain.

1993 Vincent Schaefer died. A U.S. research chemist, he invented ‘cloud seeding’ with dry ice to cause rain or snow.

2008 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation that will ban trans fats in restaurants and retail food establishments. The ban goes into effect on January 1, 2010. California is the first state to ban trans fats in restaurants. There are several cities that have banned them, and California and Oregon have previously banned trans fats in school meals.